synecdoche.

i always do this, i always stay up all night before i leave somewhere. it’s my instinct — i am trying to stay in this place as long as possible. i can’t leave here. so i attempt to extend these hours, the whole time fighting against the miserable weight of constrained time. the whole eternal night i have to pack but am not packing… and there’s something about the darkness of the night— it hides the passage of time, it helps me to feel as if I’ve plunged into a timelessness.

but it’s 4am already. impending daylight. any secondminutehour now.

it’s similar to that state of limbo i experience every morning. my alarm goes off and i want to try to merge my dreams into reality during those five minute intervals between snoozes. it takes me so long to wake up; i don’t want to give up that other reality just yet.

i think i believe that if i stay awake tonight into tomorrow, into boston, i will perhaps not have to shut paris off, that i will be able to drag who i am in paris with me to boston.

oh, this ritual of disavowal. i do it every time i go back to boston from new york; i make nights last forever and they spill over into day. and then, suddenly, i find myself in boston after a blurred bus ride that seems to have erased my previous hours while at the same time mythologizing them. and then there’s an imperceptible reversal.

new york and this summer are horrible, hot breathed, fogged memories, and paris is a cool, comfortable reality. but when i return to new york, paris will become the dream, will become the false, the myth, the erased; i will perceive it as a brief four month escape. yet it is in paris that i am more awake, less paralyzed, less of a construction, less drowned in thought.